DIS is a multimedia art magazine. DIS is a dissection of fashion and commerce which seeks to dissolve conventions, distort realities, disturb ideologies, dismember the establishment, and disrupt the dismal dissemination of fashion discourse that's been distinctly distributed in order to display the disenfranchised as disposable. All is open to discussion. There is no final word. DIS is Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl, and David Toro.

The most groundbreaking art of the 20th century is called avant-garde. But perhaps these pioneering artists were not so pioneering after all. The artistic avant-garde did not break with established genres and traditions so much as it systematically established genres and tradition. Much of what is considered “radical,” “innovative” and “original” about Duchamp and the artistic avant-garde was brought into existence by people who were not visual artists. They were rather what in the art world is known as ”non-artists,” such as journalists, designers, writers, commercial artists and satirists. What is new in the art world is often new only in the art world.

Chapter 2: Backdating Monochrome Painting

In 1913, the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) takes an extra look at what exactly he is up to. He does not fancy the painting he is working on, and paints it over with black. This, on the other hand, he likes so much that, as he later recounts, he “couldn’t eat, drink, or sleep” for an entire week. This is all big and new: “Everything we’ve loved, is lost: we are in a desert… Ahead of us there is a black square on a white background!”

Kazimir MalevichBlack Square, 1913/1915

Since then, Malevich paints more versions of the “Black Square,” but keeps backdating them to 1913. It is an important moment in art history: Malevich is today celebrated as the originator of the single color painting, The Monochrome.
Malevich gets excited, and quickly he is on a roll. Next he paints “Red Square – Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions,” and after that “Suprematist Composition: White on White.” But even if many art historians are now celebrating the 100th anniversary of the monochrome, this is old news.

In the first volume of Laurence Sterne’s novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” from 1759, the immoderately facetious character, Yorick, dies all too early in the story. A beloved is lost. Sterne marks this tragic turn of events with an illustration, making up a whole page: a black rectangle. It could depict a grave. But this is not painting. Nor are the black monochromes which French caricaturists like Bertall depict in the French press from the 1840s onwards.
What apparently is a painting, however, is the monochrome exhibited in 1851 in Brussels. The painting might have disappeared, but the description of it has not: “The ocean is blue – the sky is blue – and Pandora’s chemise is blue – her blonde hair is blue. And when he has painted her flesh blue, one would think that the artist was blue.”
Another early monochrome painting appears in Paris in 1882 at a group exhibition organized by Les Arts Incoherénts. The poet Paul Bilhaud (1854-1933) exhibits a canvas painted black in a golden frame: “Negroes fighting in a tunnel.” His colleague, writer and journalist Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) is so enthused that he subsequently exhibits a white piece of paper with the title “First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather” and a scarlet red piece of fabric named “The Apoplectic Cardinals’ Tomato Harvest by the Red Sea.” Alphonse Allais is on a roll — just like Malevich three decades later. Allais proclaims himself “monochroidal painter.” Later in 1897 he makes a booklet with eight monochromes, “Primo-Aprilesque Album,” which he does not manage to publish the first of April…

Alphonse AllaisNegroes Fighting in a Cave, in the Nighttime, 1897Based on lost painting (1882)

Alphonse AllaisFirst Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather, 1897Based on lost work (1883)

Alphonse AllaisApoplectic Cardinals’ Tomato Harvest by the Red Sea, 1897Based on a lost work (1884)

In 1954 another French artist, Yves Klein (1928-1962), launches his great career with a little book “Yves peintures,” which contains 10 monochromes. His colleague Ben Vautier points out that it is somewhat similar to Allais’ album. Klein replies: ”He didn’t follow it through.” Soon after, Klein becomes famous for painting canvases and other stuff blue, so-called International Klein Blue – a color which he goes on to patent.
In New York from around 1950 onwards, many big painters do monochromes. But the battle over the historically most fought-over color, black, continues. Barnett Newman (1905-1970) is convinced he owns it. In 1966, in a letter to the writer Barbara Rose, he complains that she writes an article about Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings “without mentioning my black painting, Abraham, the first and still the only black painting in history.”

L’Eau des Algues Two alchemists already aware of each other’s Instagrams meet for the first time in a gay sauna. They are swimming; it’s the Hood By Air afterparty in Paris. They are Lukas Hofmann and Nils Amadeus Lange. Months later, they meet again. They are on the edge of yet another steaming pool; it’s the Manifesta Biennale closing event at Cabaret Voltaire. They are performing the perfume titled “L’eau des Algues.” Head notes: Zürich… [read more »]

While reading A Very Short Introduction to Game Theory, I came across the following passage, “If you want people to vote, we need to move to a more decentralized system in which every vote really does count enough to outweigh the lack of enthusiasm for voting which so many people obviously feel…Simply repeating the slogan that ‘every vote counts’ isn’t ever going to work, because it isn’t true.” I was jarred. For me, anecdotally knowing… [read more »]

When life is being super unfair, just do what we all do: suffer the consequences. I wake up and the first thing I do is check my phone. A convenient euphemism for using Facebook’s machine learning techniques to discover which 300 entries are statistically most likely to stand out from the tens of thousands of brain dumps my friends and family have produced over the last 48 hours. Impressed by what Facebook provides, I think… [read more »]

In order to make sense of state politics in the birthplace of statistical marketing and the internet, one has to be wary of the effects of these technologies on the country’s popular media. In a time when our news and advertisements are tailored to our pre-recorded political opinions, it can be especially difficult to empathize with differing political views. Likewise, learning about the histories of state politics is not encouraged by platforms that profit from… [read more »]

We can get together and laugh about it. We can heave sighs and express disbelief, but it’s never enough. This presidential election year has lasted for years, and they sit on citizens like a slick film. We feel touched by an unshakable germ, invaded by a blood-sucker, afflicted by a social cancer, drained of the plump vitality of life and the amazing liberty of choices, and transformed into a cynical, depressed shrivel. After being touched… [read more »]

What is a piece of clothing that “works”? Who is working whom? Is the one who poses the one who actually “works” hardest? The S/S 2017 collection of Berlin-based, Swedish- Vietnamese designer NHU DUONG entitled ‘WORK COLLECTION’ plays with the ideas of professionalism, leisure and appropriateness through a range of garments that are inspired by work outfits and hobby uniforms. Overalls, raw denim outfits, kung-fu pyjamas, biker pants, baggy tights and gloves, bomber-jackets, bomber suits,… [read more »]

Preparing to Welcome the Chthulucene is a text made up of living exercises to accompany Haraway’s theorization of the Chthulucene and her upcoming book Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Haraway posits that not only should we name the Anthropocene carefully (including the terms Capitalocene and Plantationocene within its narrative) but that we should also be using this crucial ecological timeframe to move towards a dynamically multi-species, “sym-chtonic“, sym-poietic future: the Chthulucene.… [read more »]